Maya

If human life was wiped off the face of the earth it would make no difference to the universe.  It would go on exactly as before, the various heavenly bodies charting their precise metronomic paths across eternal and infinite space.  If all life was wiped off the earth it would still make no difference to the universe.  If the earth was destroyed, shattered into tiny bits and ejected into meteoric trajectories traversing the far corners of the galaxy, it would still make no difference.  No difference at all.  Nothing would change.  The vastness of space would remain unruffled.  If the solar system were destroyed, the sun collapsed into itself, the size of a football field, the planets crushed into it, it would barely disturb the immediate neighbourhood: perhaps somewhat like thunder rolling in the near distance of your house.  Any place even fifty miles away only sees the flashes of occasional lightning.  Places at a cosmic equivalent of this distance would only notice the phenomenon if they were looking up, and may even need specialised instruments to discover the event.  Like we need special instruments to “view” supernovae and black holes. 

Billions of years of existence, millions of years of life, hundreds of thousands of years of human “development” wiped out in a flash and no one to see, to lament, to mourn and to remember.  No archaeological remains to prove that the earth had existed, teeming with life, with differences, with love, with strife.  No trace of the poetic masterpieces or the paintings or sculptures, the haunting ragas, the gripping prose, or the masterful tracts of reasoned conviction left for subsequent discovery. 

Do you mean to say that we can be erased so totally?  Is death then put in place in order to prepare us for that ultimate disappearance?  Is this the mystery of life?  Is this Maya?  The illusion of overwhelming importance, of centrality, of existence - even - in the face of absolute indifference.  If no one and nothing will acknowledge that we existed then how can we be certain that we do? 

Isn’t it Amazing We Survived? Or It’s Not Over Yet

The Europeans had the dream, and they had the determination to achieve it.  We had the courage to survive it.  Till now that is.  The European dream is not over yet.  Nor is our resilience nearing exhaustion.  Both have a way to go.  The dream (or nightmare) plays on.

One could write endless pages on this dream-nightmare/ thrust-parry/ genocide-population overload.  Where does one begin?  Did the whole thing start with the rise of Judaism?  Was Moses the original sin?  Or should one blame Jesus and the Christians?  We could also blame the Romans, for their hedonistic excesses, which resulted in their downfall at the hands of the barbarians from the north.  Maybe the Christians would not have got so firm a hold on Europe had it not been for the backlash against Roman excesses. 

Perhaps both the Romans and the Germanic tribes who overthrew the Western Roman Empire are to blame.  After all, a direct cause of the cancer of modernity was the feudal-medieval past of Europe.  A past born of a curious (to say the least) mix of Roman and Northern barbarities.  A past steeped in rigidities, absurdities, heresies, slaveries, persecutions, inquisitions, and witch hunts.  A dark and dank past, which was the best, most powerful incentive imaginable for the bloody, though brilliant, slash that followed.

Allowing one’s imagination to fly a little more, maybe we can just about include Islam, the last of the three Abrahamic faiths to emerge from the dry wastes of Palestine-Arabia, in the blame game.  It seems reasonable to assume that rising Islam had a most powerful impact on Catholic-Christian Europe.  Any takers?  Would the European-Christian civilisation like to shove the responsibility of its worst excesses on the pernicious influence of fundamentalist Islam?  Aren’t they doing it already with respect to much that they perpetrate today?

But what was the most immediate cause of the madness?  I pose this question specifically for the sake of our Cartesian minds, trained to linear fine-ness in casuistry.  What if we can’t identify one?  Does that mean no one is to blame?  Or, that everyone is to blame?  Like the Europeans would like to think with respect to global warming?  Should the rise of Europe be viewed as part of the larger scheme of things?  Not in a religious, theistic sense but in the way Buddha described it: a phenomenon in the realm of dependent co-arising.  This is because that is.  That is because this is.  Europe was because Africa, America, Australia and Asia were?  If Buddha was around today he would have probably said, yes to this question.  But I am not Buddha.  Not yet.  So I will continue with my thought stream.   

Moving on, I am wonderstruck at several phenomena.  I am amazed at the power of the European thrust.  It has spread its tentacles into the remotest nook and cranny of the world.  No conqueror, no conquest was so comprehensive, so complete, so continuing.  What it could not conquer by brute force and unprecedented barbarity it conquered by deceit, duplicity and diplomacy.  By fine words and finer sentiments.  And it continues to conquer in these manners: simultaneously using murder and conciliation to subdue and subjugate.  To serve the purposes of its compulsions, which purposes it itself does not know.  Truly, a magnificent achievement by any standards.  A benchmark for all future conquests.  God (if there is one) forbid that there is another conqueror, or another conquest.

I am also struck by the ongoing nature of this conquest.  Starting with physical occupation, displacing and exterminating tens of millions and, subjugating hundreds of millions more, the conquest evolved to what is called indirect rule: perfected by the British in India and applied by Europe worldwide.  Thereafter, in a brilliant application of the philosophical implications of indirect rule, the conquest set its colonies free.  Of course, before granting freedom, the structure of subjugation – external and internal – was firmly in place.  The European world view was the only alternative.  Not only were the Europeanised elites of the former colonies thoroughly convinced (with few exceptions) of this fact, the system for perpetuating this world view was also irrevocably entrenched. 

That non-Europeanism has survived despite such a systematic onslaught is also a marvel.  As is it marvelous that people subjected to intensive genocide, the original inhabitants of the Americas and Australia, have survived.  This tells us something about the resilience of life; of human nature.  It also tells us that there is a miscalculation in the European game.  Busy discovering manifest destiny, and the individual self, the European conquerors forgot that all processes, including the process of conquest, proceed dialectically.  As an aside it is important to mention here that dialectics was neither discovered nor invented by the Europeans.  Non-European thought has recognised dialectics as an operating principle of the universe for millennia.  Buddha’s thesis of dependant co-arising is one expression of it: this is because that is; that is because this is.  And the dialectics of conquest dictates that the tables be turned: the conquerors be conquered, the fires be quenched, and the leaves grow again in all their plethoric diversity.    

Be that as it may, battered, bruised, truncated, dystopic-ised, the world has survived this conquest till now.  The Europeans, however, have one more ace up their sleeve.  This is the ace of irreversible destruction of the global habitat, with (European) technology being the only genie capable of saving us, and the world.  Given that the realm of world views is firmly under European control, it is likely that this ace will carry the conquest through: till the tables turn, or the world is destroyed, whatever you may wish to call it.         

Clairvoyance Machines

What do you mean when you say (to yourself or to another) that you “know”? For example, I know ………..

Think of a thousand examples. Think of a million. In each you will find that the expression “I know” is premised upon an ability to predict the future. This is extraordinary!!!!

It means that we are clairvoyance machines. All life is clairvoyant. Knowledge is clairvoyance. Of course, on average, we are only approximately clairvoyant. Despite knowledge we can not predict with certainty. But we can predict. That is the point. Life is all about predicting the future.

It means that clairvoyants are people whose ability is more developed that the average persons. It validates astrology, palmistry, tarot, tea leaves, crystal balls, magic sticks, face readers and everyone else who claims to predict. It is superfluous to add “the future” because predictions can only be about the future. So, as “knowledge” gets refined it becomes more and more about predicting the future. As “civilizations” decay, this predict-ability becomes more and more about the self. Since, “civilization” is about the self, collective and individual. In other words, the inevitable “end” of all “civilization” is to perfect the art of prediction.

Why is it then that astrology and all the other methods and means used by people to aid their powers of prediction do not give good results? Or, in other words, give such unsatisfactory results. Because, like any other “system” of “thought”, these methods are based upon a simplification of reality; which is both chaotic and complex. The simplification, which modernity generally calls a “theory”, is necessary because the reality is too complex (and chaotic) to be comprehended. In other words, this reality is too complexly chaotic (or chaotically complex) to be comprehended directly. It must be put through a “mill” that grinds (into comprehensible bits), grades (into collections of uniform size) and arranges (into groups of “similar” types) the reality inputs that we receive.

What is the mill? We are the mill? Our whole body is the mill. Every pore of our body, every organ, every sense, is geared to filtering the onslaught of inputs that reality is. Filtering it, grinding, it grading it, arranging it, making “sense” of it. With the object to refining one’s “knowledge” about reality. Why should we want to “know” (or have knowledge about) reality? Because, we need to “predict” reality. Why do we need to predict reality? Because, the ability to predict reality is crucial to our survival. Without such ability our chances of survival are greatly diminished.

Assuming Darwinian natural selection, it is obvious that once it is accepted that the ability to “predict” reality is crucial to survival this ability must increase over time. Those with a greater ability to predict are more likely to survive (and propagate) as compared with those with a lesser ability.

But what is the object of this whole game? I don’t know. Who are the “greatest” humans in any situation? They are the witch doctors, the shamans, the crystal ball readers, the palmists, the astrologers, the clairvoyants. In fact, the clairvoyants are the greatest among these greats because they don’t need any system, any theory, to be able to predict. They have the ability to pluck out the face of the future from the masses of complexly chaotic information that is available to all of us. Why do I say “face”? Because, I don’t think they “see” the future in multiple dimensions. They probably see an image of the future. One can use one of the thousands of descriptions, real and imaginary, that are available, to describe what happens. Both, the real and the imaginary are, probably, equally “true”.

What is true, what is not; what is real and what is not? I think that if we see ourselves as clairvoyance organisms (life forms, creatures, whatever) then these distinctions cease to have the kind of meaning that we are used to giving them. Imagination is as “real” as anything else. Of course, reality exists. But ‘reality’ does not exist as knife sharp distinct from ‘imaginary’. There is a huge area of overlap. Theoretically, one could learn to live in this area, able to partake of both the “worlds”.